This blog will post detailed news items about GLBT issues. Some of the issues include the "don't ask don't tell" policy for gays in the military, and gay marriage. Please note that my main website is DOASKDOTELL.COM (link on my Profile).

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About Me

Since the 1990s I have been very involved with fighting the military "don't ask don't tell" policy for gays in the military, and with First Amendment issues. Best contact is 571-334-6107 (legitimate calls; messages can be left; if not picked up retry; I don't answer when driving) Three other url's: doaskdotell.com, billboushka.com johnwboushka.com Links to my URLs are provided for legitimate content and user navigation purposes only.
My legal name is "John William Boushka" or "John W. Boushka"; my parents gave me the nickname of "Bill" based on my middle name, and this is how I am generally greeted. This is also the name for my book authorship. On the Web, you can find me as both "Bill Boushka" and "John W. Boushka"; this has been the case since the late 1990s. Sometimes I can be located as "John Boushka" without the "W." That's the identity my parents dealt me in 1943!

Friday, May 29, 2015

I can recall a radio interview with George McGovern back in
early 1972, when, for all his “liberalism”, the South Dakota senator warned
that campaigning on “legalization of marijuana” and “legalization of marriage
between homosexuals” could “dive the Democrats to defeat”.

Now, the unexpectedly quickly progress of acceptance gay
marriage (along with the numbers of gay parents and same-sex couples raising
kids) in most western countries and many states, after any judicial prodding at
all under equal protection, triangulates the cultural war. There are three points in equilibrium, not
just two sides.

It used to be that homosexuality, especially in men, was
viewed as a proxy for character-related failure of gender socialization, and
for the ability to participate “properly”
as a member of the community rather than following one’s own ends. That sort of idea fueled many conservative
arguments against even tolerating homosexuality in the past, which had peaked
in the late 1950s under McCarthyism and then roared back for a couple of years
in the 80s because of AIDS in some areas of the country.

Writers like George Gilder (“Men and Marriage”, 1986, and
the earlier “Sexual Suicide”, 1973) had argued that most men only find real
purpose in life when they become fathers within marriage. Pornography, certainly more conspicuous in
the straight world than gay (just look at Times Square in the early 70s) was
viewed as evidence of character short-circuiting. But there were only two sides to the issue
then.

With the acceptance of not only gay marriage but of same-sex
headed families (which have always existed) there’s a new expectation on the
horizon. A man can marry another man and
they can spend the rest of their lives together. They can be expected to remain passionate,
even as they age and become less “attractive”, or, more seriously, if
misfortune falls one of them. With the
end of DADT, the possibility that one serves openly and then returns as a
wounded or maimed veteran, and stays with a partner, and even continues raising
children, increases. I know that, early
in life, my presence in closer quarters was seen as distracting to the
self-confidence of heterosexual men.

Would I have been able to pursue such a life if I had been
born 50 years later? Maybe that’s a
meaningless question. That sort of
opportunity did not exist for me when I was coming of age. I was expected to be aggressive and
protective in a way comporting to gender.
That stopped everything. So made a separate peace, in a separate universe
fantasy world, of perfection, or angels.
I became a persistent form of competition for the “conventional”. But I found out, with my own eldercare experience, that family responsibility doesn't need sexual intercourse to come about.

Wednesday, May 27, 2015

Zack Ford has an interesting piece on ThinkProgress, about
GOP presidential hopeful Marc Ribio, paraphrased as “If we don’t stop gay
rights, soon the teachings of the Catholic Church will be ‘hate speech’”, link
here.

There is a lot of double talk in his arguments, as if he
were chasing quantum theory and all its contradictions. But it is true, the Vatican teachings, taken
literally, insist that all sexuality be directed to intercourse in marriage
that is open to procreation. The effect
of the theology is to penalize those who don’t participate in heterosexual
sexual intercourse, unless they are nuns or priests. It’s a strange irony.

Yet, in the grand scheme of things, yes, reproduction is an
important biological function. People
who have children usually have longer life expectancies. As one Washington Times columnist (female) in
a private email once wrote to me, “Reproduction rules.”

Monday, May 25, 2015

A sweeping anti-discrimination bill protecting LGBT people
in specified areas will become law Wednesday June 3, 2015, even without
Republican governor Larry Hogan’s signature, according to a Washington Post
article this morning by Josh Hicks, link here.

The law prevents discrimination in fertility treatments
regardless of sexual orientation, and allows gender changes on birth
certificates.

Sunday afternoon, quite a few people made their way to the
TownDC Patio on U Street along the Green Line after the Nationals’ baseball
victory that afternoon (4-1). The Patio
had a fog machine that cooled outdoor patrons and actually created real
rainbows if viewed from certain angles.

Saturday, May 23, 2015

Memorial Day weekend in Washington DC always marks DC Black
Pride, which precedes the usual Capital Pride in June. Its website and links is here.

Friday night, the Cobalt in DC held a small “Rich White
Ladies” stage show upstairs around midnight. Something interesting: an iPhone can cut through the mist to the stage, but a Canon Power Shot cannot.

The crowd volume was pretty normal for what I remember on
Friday nights, even if I haven’t been there as often lately. Dancing takes place on both levels.

Yesterday was a "crazy day" for me; it was time to "decompress".

It’s also noteworthy that Friday, Ireland became the first
country where a same-sex marriage referendum passed, Blade storyhere. The margin of victory was quite large. Here's an analysis on how "individualism" contributed to the big "win", by James Peron in Huffington, link.

Thursday, May 21, 2015

Dr. Robert Gates, president of the Boy Scouts of America,
has told the BSA that its current organizational ban on gay adult scout leaders
is unsustainable. The Scouting News Room
has the PDF for his remarks here. There is a summary story in Vox Media by
Margarita Noriega here.

The BSA recently allowed local troops to decide whether to
admit openly gay scouts. This was
surprisingly difficult despite the repeal of the example-setting military “Don’t
Ask, Don’t Tell” in 2011. The Supreme Court had upheld the BSA's constitutional right to a ban based on its status as a private group back in 2000.

Just as with the military, the notion that the presence of
gay men in a culture dependent on “unit cohesion” undermines this motivation at
a psychological level, has receded with younger adults who have grown up in a
more individualistic culture. For me,
this whole line of thinking had started in a college dorm at William and Mary
in 1961. Overtime, it experienced increasing difficulty renting public facilities.

I was a Cub Scout for one year, at age 8. I couldn’t stand it! But I remember the tasks. Like tie your necktie.

Sunday, May 17, 2015

Trevor Burns has a Washington Post article, “Conservatives
say marriage has always been between a man and a woman. They’re wrong”, May 13, link here.

The article notes that some West African societies have
allowed lesbian marriages, and even allowed the “female husband” to keep
custody of biological children from the wife (sired by biological men).

It also notes that some native-American societies have
allowed same-sex marriages when both work roles are represented.

Burns notes that it seems odd to appeal to historical
tradition to maintain an established notion of opposite-sex-only marriage. Yet the book “The Great Divide” by William
Gairdner (Book reviews, May 14) notes that conservatives believe that moral
notions are deeply rooted in tradition and not always subject to intellectual
parsing. Even the Supreme Court has said
this in the past (“Bowers v. Hardwick”, 1986, well before “Lawrence v. Texas”
(2003).

It also seems evident that practically all societies still
tie marriage in some way to raising children and to group survival. The changes in women’s roles in more recent
decades have made gender roles much less critical than in the past, to the
point that in a few cases, outstanding soldiers or male athletes have then
declared themselves to be transgendered women.

Many older societies have also recognized eunuchs or asexual people as have priesthood functions.

Saturday, May 16, 2015

The Casa Ruby Community Center is starting to move some residents into a new
home in the Columbia Heights section of Washington DC. Lou Chibbaro, Jr. has a detailed story in the
Washington Blade this weekend here. The
Center’s slogan is “We are everyone’s home” or “Somos la casa de todas”. The City Paper has a 2013 article on the life
of trans activist Ruby Corado, by Jenny Rogers, here.

The group appears to have an affiliation with the DC Center
also (which is helping Reel Affirmations with the 2015 film festival the last
weekend of August 2015.

Thursday, May 14, 2015

Some employers have told associates with same-sex partners
on corporate health plans that they must wed in order to keep benefits, if they
live in states where same-sex marriage has become legal (37 of them now). That’s the gist of a front page Wall Street
Journal article by Rachel Emmo Silverman, here. A good question occurs if the marriage
occurred in another state but the employer’s state has been forced to recognize
it, or if the employee lives in a different state from where he or she works. Delta and Verizon were mentioned. In some cases, employers are dropping spousal
coverage for spouses who could get coverage elsewhere.

I’ve started reading the book “The Great Divide” by William
Gairdner, and I peeked (or "sneak-previewed") at his chapter on “Homosexuality and Gay Marriage” and
his comparison chart on the “Modern Liberal View” against the “Conservative
View”. In general, he spends a lot more
space on the “conservative” position but he claims to be writing in subjunctive
mood. One problem is conflating “homophobia” with opposition to gay marriage per
se. It’s one thing to want to be left
alone by the state, and by your employer, parents, and others when you’re an
adult. It’s another to demand the “privilege”
of benefits in marriage. But these
issues come together. If you don’t have equal rights, sometimes you wind up
being expected to make sacrifices for others who are more privileged. Arguments against gay marriage do have a lot
to do with willingness to accept the risks and responsibilities of
procreation (as well as some men wanting some primacy for penetrative intercourse itself). But it’s no longer a
two-sided argument. Commitment in gay marriage still involves giving up adolescent
fantasies and staying with a partner when hardships or challenges – even to
sexual attractiveness – inevitably arrive. Gairdner also makes an interesting claim that all "sex" really involves the potential for reproduction, and that homosexuality is really just "homosensuality" (still the same thing to the human brain) and he rehearses the usual conservative arguments against depending on immutability. He also poohs the "altruism" argument, which would seem to neglect the growing issue with eldercare.

Wednesday, May 13, 2015

The Food and Drug Administration has announced it will lift
the absolute ban on MSM (men who have sex with men, since 1977) from blood
donations. These are non-binding
recommendations and appear to apply only to blood and blood products (like stem
cells for marrow transplants), not to organ donations. The Washington Post has a Scribd PDF link
here. (Note: the Embed code doesn’t work, don’t
know why).

The recommendations require abstinence from anal or oral sex
with other men for one year. The
recommendations are not different for monogamous, even married, male
couples. The FDA notes that married
couples may be less likely to use condoms. There is also controversy, still, over the
effectiveness of condoms.

Lambda Legal Defense and Education Fund has a press release,
critical of the FDA release, noting that any HIV would manifest in an antigen
test within at most 60 days. (That
reminds me of the discussions of the maximum possible incubation period for
Ebola last year – 21 days, or more like 42?)

I have not learned of any HIV cases among my own cohort of
friends or people that I circulate with.
On a practical level, spread among “educated” gay men seems to be much
less today than it was in the 1980s.
Behavior does seem to be much more cautious, among men that I talk
to.

Tuesday, May 12, 2015

The most obvious gay news today may well be bill in Texas,
which could be mimicked in other states, to pre-empt a coming Supreme Court
decision on “states’ rights” and gay marriage which, it would seem, social
conservatives expect to go against “them”.
The constitutional legalities of this is a topic for another day. It sounds rather silly, and like an uncoerced
confession.

It still seems rather important to me, at least, to lay out
how I have processed my own sexuality and how I have processed the reactions of
others to it, and how that blossomed to
how I view coercive efforts in other areas. For purely logical reasons, depending on
immutability for political battles has never seemed like a good idea to
me. The truth is more nuanced.

As the very first sentence of my first DADT book notes, my
erotic interests, during teen years, seem to develop on their own, which
follows the idea of immutability. But there was a particular context that is
disturbing. By grade school, I was “weaker”
than other boys my age, and behind in coordination (I didn’t learn to swim, and
my only report card D was in tumbling
unit in PE in 11th grade). I also developed a compulsive tendency
for attention-getting by interrupting in class.

Why I fell behind physically isn’t clear. My birthday is in
July and I started first grade at 6, so I may have been younger than most
boys. Malcolm Gladwell might make a lot
of that. But, by the time I was in ninth
grade, my skills in, say, playing back yard softball were about par with boys
three or four years younger, and that isn’t so good.

I had measles in June 1950, before second grade, but comment
report cards show some mild concerns about development in first grade. Second grade went well, but my third grade
teacher was all over me about my physical backwardness. During third grade, I started piano, and it
may well be that my brain was pruning what it wouldn’t need prematurely to
focus on what I was good at. This would
be something similar to mild autism, or Asperger’s. That doesn’t always affect physical motor
development, but it sounds reasonable that it sometimes does.

But I developed a behavior pattern that psychologists
sometimes call “upward affiliation”.
There was a 50s-style myth that you couldn’t be male and smart at the
same time, so I admired young men who were “both at the same time” and,
following the cultural values of the time, believed them to be “morally”
superior, or virtuous. This took on the
aspects of an almost religious belief.

No question, in my case, my own values started to affect by “automatic”
sexual response to what I would see in others. Then I would develop the tendency to monitor
others “privately” to reassure myself that they lived up to “standards”.

I knew that the culture expected men to provide for women
(after giving them future babies). The
idea of “no sex except in marriage” (“SIBM” as in the Army) seemed to set up a
double standard. But during the period
after my William and Mary Expulsion (1961) and NIH stay (1962) it became more apparent
that religious Christian standards of sexual morality were designed to make
marital sex exciting and keep marriages together as people aged and were
challenged in various ways.

I also picked up on the idea that my “upward affiliation”
disturbed or at least perturbed others.
It had the potential, when expressed (as in the closed environment in a
dorm, or later at NIH, and today on the Internet) to lead others who were less “physically
gifted” to believe they were somehow morally “unworthy” for marriage and
procreation. This could become more
disturbing to some people than the more usual competition that leads to
jealousy. At least, this is the message
I was getting from people, who saw me as psychologically sadistic at times. Yet, I remained attached and “addicted” to my
own moral beliefs, which presented a certain dualism.

I was preoccupied enough with my own ideas that I simply
didn’t even think about the idea of having a family myself, or raising my own
biological progeny to adulthood. From
observation, I certainly see what that means to other people today. I also see the risks. A child can grow up to create the next
Facebook test, or vaccine or cancer test, or a child can be profoundly disabled
and needy. A lot of luck is involved as
well as good parenting. I made my own separate peace and lived in my own world, where marriage and lineage were a private afterthought.

So I had no desire for intercourse with women, even when I
tried dating. I could interpret this in
terms of my physical backwardness. Had I
been more competitive myself physically, I probably would have viewed all this
differently, and become interested in having a family. Then I would have my own children today, and
a biological extension of myself until the Sun becomes a red giant. As an only child, that means my parents’
lineage “dies” too.

Still, I could have married and had children, and maintained
an “upward affiliation” for men at the same time. We all know that his happens a lot. That could have led to a situation where I
could have exposed a potential wife to HIV in the 1980s, even leading to infection
at birth. I never did become
infected. I was attractive than usual
and less active than usual, and moved out of NYC in 1979. Still, I was active enough in Dallas through
1983 that I could have been infected. I
just wasn’t. Or do I have a gene that
offers some unusual resistance to HIV?
That’s possible, a kind of reverse Darwinism.

There used to be a stereotype that gay men were effeminate
and “weak”, an idea that gradually died in the 1970s, after Stonewall, as gay
men, at least in the large cities, became more visible. In fact, I found when
competing in physical events (like the Oak Lawn Softball Association in Dallas
in the 1980s, or hiking with Adventuring in DC) that I was behind most adult
gay men, too, physically. I remember a
moment in December 1990 when on a hike up a 3800-foot ridge in West Virginia on
an Adventuring hike that I fell behind on the 1500-foot climb and a stray dog
met me and escorted me up! * We all know
that even transgendered people who start as men can be physically competitive
(like Bruce Jenner, or “Lady Valor”, Kristin Beck (Movies, Sept. 4, 2014), well
before they change genders.

Does this refute immutability? No, it refines it. It also adds fuel to arguments about “fairness”,
and concerns that someone like me can ride on someone else’s sacrifice.

Fast forward decades later, when am a self-published author
and blogger leveraging my story on the web behind the scenes. I face a certain coercion and disruption from
some people, who want me to become silent, follow them, but, guess what, pimp
their causes and, even more, take turns caring for their troubled
children. And, I was caught in this
situation, of having to protect my own mother, and “take care” of people. Yes, I am supposed to do that despite not
having the experience of having my own family. It's certainly true that, as a singleton now, I'm not as flexible in taking advantage of life-extending medical care, should that be necessary, if I haven't built the real world social network from family (ironically less could be done in these situations when I was growing up, so I didn't internalize the idea of using a marital relationship that way, as would be necessary today). That really puts a lot of twists in the gay marriage and gay adoption
debates. It also means that some measures, like that suddenly announced in Texas,
show a self-serving moral circularity.

I sometimes also get confronted, somewhat coercively, with
the idea that I should become personally involved with others in a way to make
others “all right” (including pimping narrow causes based on "need"). Complicating the
moral assessment is the fact that at the end of 2010 I benefited from
inheriting most of an estate. I
certainly buy the idea that, in the grand scheme of things, I should be able to
provide for other people. But I want to do by making my own creative work
successful, not by pimping other people’s causes and needs.

There is something, though, about the whole upward
affiliation issue, the whole “he can do better than that” idea. Yes, liberty seems to demand the right to control
your own relationships, to reject others without question, and to define the
course you will take before taking on a family. But “body fascism” is allowed
to be OK, because if reinforces some moral beliefs that are quite addictive
(like religion), we can all find ourselves drifting back toward real
fascism. Around the world, our enemies
know this.

I guess the next time someone who doesn’t appeal to me wants
to dance, while I’m gawking at a disco, I should remember this.

Update: May 13

The Dallas Morning News has a detailed story of the legislation proposed in Texas, here, by Robert Garrett.

Sunday, May 10, 2015

A local Baltimore paper “Baltimore Brew” reports (in astory May 9 by Edward Gunts) that the Club Hippo,
the disco club at N. Charles and Eager Streets in Baltimore, is likely to close
because the owner. Chuck Bowers, is negotiating a sale of the property for a
CVS store. I first heard about this in an "accidental" conversation before watching a film at the Maryland Film Festival at the
Walters Art Museum today. Note that
there are many detailed comments on this news story online.

After the film, I went to the Hippo and then the Grand
Central and bartenders at both places knew about the story. At the Hippo, I was told that the Hippo would
probably close in less than six months, but should be open until the fall. It will be open during Baltimore Pride (later
this year than in previous years, July 25-26). I was told that negotiations had been going on for over a
year and that this business matter has nothing to do with the Baltimore
riots. But apparently it had stayed
under wraps until yesterday.

Business in bars in Baltimore were hurt badly by the curfew
last weekend, especially when the mayor kept it Saturday night, May 2. I was
told that they had closed at 9 PM and didn’t really try to have earlier events.
Some businesses may be able to collect
on business interruption insurance but I don’t know if these establishments
were covered.

The Hippo has a sports bar (Orioles and Ravens please), karaoke room (used on many
nights) and disco floor with a sunken disco. It has been open since 1972, and was remodeled
in the 80s. My own impression, from
occasional visits, is that business, at least late on Saturday nights, has been
down a bit since maybe around 2009. It
used to be much more packed, especially during the 1990s.

It might be possible for a new business owner to pick up the
license and open a similar club somewhere else in the general area.

The gay bar business can be a difficult one. When bars lose leases, they often have
trouble getting liquor licenses for new locations (especially in Washington DC,
40 miles away). A few decades back, they
had difficult relations with police and syndicates in many cities (the
so-called “mafia bar” in New York in the early 70s, and the attempt of a NYC
mayor in the 1960s to close most gay bars before the 1964-1965 Worlds
Fair). In Dallas, until 1981, they had
to deal with police harassment and false arrests for “public lewdness”. Reading between the lines, owners may feel
more concerned about security, given the unprecedented nature of some global
politics today.

Neighborhoods also change, as LGBT people are more spread
out than they used to be. There was a club-restaurant, the French Quarter, in Old Town Alexandria VA (and another club, the Metro, which has some gay events) in the 1990s, but it closed some time before 2000. That area could use a club.

But let’s hope something works out, at least another similar
disco club in a nearby location. Baltimore, though, as we know, is going through unusually difficult
times with the relations between the administration and underprivileged people
in the city.

Update: May 11
The Baltimore Sun has a story on the closing this fall here.

Friday, May 08, 2015

The school board for Fairfax County Public Schools voted
10-1 Thursday night, at a stormy meeting, to include gender identity in its
list of protected categories for students and employees, which presumably will include
teachers and subs.

Fairfax County is a large “urban county” (population over
800000) in Virginia immediately southwest of Washington DC, separated from DC
by Arlington County and the City of Alexandria.
Fairfax City, in the middle of the county, is separate. In Virginia, incorporated cities are always
separate from the counties that surround them, but Virginia may be the only
state that has a format called “urban county” (for Arlington and Fairfax) which
seems to offer some financial benefits.

The FCPS board said it will work on logistics for how to
handle potential locker room and lavatory issues.

I worked as a substitute teacher in Fairfax County from 2004
to 2007. I also worked in Arlington
County. I did encounter some issues, and
they are widely discussed on other blogs (especially the “BillBoushka” blog July
25 and July 27, 2007 entries). As far as I know, there was no explicit
protection for sexual orientation when I was working. There were some unsettling problems about
personal “off duty” Internet speech.

I did vet the idea of taking university courses and getting
a regular teacher’s license (for math) in the middle 2000’s anyway. I talked to GWU about its MeD program once,
and a man who had taught high school English in FCPS told me that he was gay
and that he was asked not to “tell” when he started teaching in 1989. Times have changed. And he DADT concept
applied outside the military.

Tuesday, May 05, 2015

Mike Huckabee sounded almost off-the-wall announcing his GOP
candidacy from Arkansas today, with some rather alarming statements.

Yes, he “threatened” the Supreme Court on the gay marriage
case, and I doubt that SCOTUS, even the conservative members, will be very
impressed. Chris Johnson has a story in
the Washington Blade here.

But there’s more. I was tuned on to CNN around 11:45 AM EDT
when Huckabee was on the air, and just before his remark on gay marriage (and religious
freedom), he talked about Iran (yes, appropriate), and then warned that the US
was not ready for the possibility of an electromagnetic pulse attack (EMP)
which could send it back to the 19th Century (see my Books blog on
this, for example the novel “One Second After”, reviewed there on July 20,
2012). He also talked about cyber terror as a threat to the power grid and our
way of life. Talking about gay marriage
immediately after these remarks, as if the supposed “self-indulgence” of
renouncing complementarity had something to do with national security, was
indeed startling. I tweeted this
immediately.

Roscoe Bartlett, from MD, has made similar remarks about the EMP threat.

Monday, May 04, 2015

Sunday, at a congregational meeting of the First Baptist
Church of the City of Washington DC, there was a brief verbal report of a
meeting of an LGBT neighborhood support group.
There weren’t any details, but the congregation is obviously dealing
with the enormous change in social values that have occurred over the past few
decades, leading to disagreements and making it difficult for any pastor to
stay a long time. On all kinds of
issues, leading back, for instance, to the days of US involvement in the Vietnam
War, there has developed a wide range of
opinions throughout the membership of the church, and a wide diversity of
experience of religion itself – whether it is very personal (as with me), or is
dictated by others. For example, I
believe that support for same-sex marriage would probably be around 50% now.

That morning, a visiting pastor had given a stunning sermon on sacrifice and military service (my issues blog), although he did not mention the repealed DADT specifically.

The long term pastor, Edward Pruden, from the 1940s through
the 1960s, raised in Richmond, was well known for progressive views on race and
civil rights even in the early 1950s. More than once he commented on racial
integration in the military under Truman as necessary (progressive in 1948),
and had offered theories as to how a Christian nation like Germany got fooled
by Nazism.

I grew up in this church, which belongs to both American and
Southern conventions, as well as several other affiliations. The church, like many downtown churches, has
experienced dwindling membership, but has prospered from real estate holdings
and the construction of a modern mainstream-market rental apartment building,
the Drake.

I thought I would relay a Washington Blade article by Mark
Lee, “Some gays and lesbians aren’t ready to win”, here retweeted by Richard Sincere (GLIL)
yesterday. Note the remarks about Bruce
Jenner’s “conservatism” and the invitation of Ted Cruz to meet with business
owners from Fire Island, NY (which I haven’t visited in a long time, as is also
the case for me with P-town).

Sunday, May 03, 2015

Saturday night, I did return to the Town Dance Boutique in
Washington DC and saw a good part of another version (see June 4, 2012) of the
show “Orange Is the New Crack”, a parody of the Netflix TV series (“Orange Is
the New Black” on the TV blog, Dec. 29, 2013).

In addition to the prison orange and some South Sea
costumes, the show offered unusual stage props, with a barbed wire fence and
search lights around it, and they stayed up during the dance afterward.

The crowd was about average or slightly bigger for a
warm-weather Saturday. Outdoors, it was
a perfect 70 degrees on the patio.

Could the Town stage provide enough room for a piano concert? Or would that defer to the 930 Club nearby?

I didn’t see any real evidence that people had come down
from Baltimore because of the curfews there.
That cannot be good. Until 8PM or
so, we had some forlorn hope that the curfew there would be lifted. Why punish the entire city for problems in a
few areas?

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